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Tuesday, October 2, 2001
Seeing The World Thru The Lens Of Hitchcock's 'Saboteur'
By Kevin John
At around four in the morning after the World Trade Center attack, a
sense of absurdity settled in for my boyfriend and me as we entered
the 15th or so hour of our vigil around the news coverage. We were
stuck between those literally incredible images of the explosions,
from ever-increasing vantage points, and the fact that no new news
was forthcoming. Was it our moral duty to watch a movie now or to
keep watching the coverage? Maybe if we kept watching, tomorrow would
never come and neither would the new era of McCarthyism we were
fearing, and best of all, it might come out that the whole thing was
some hideous CGI nightmare. After much hand-wringing and teetering
back and forth, the movie won out. But unlike every other decision
that day, the choice of what to watch came to me as an impulse —
"Saboteur."
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, "Saboteur" is a medley of dissenting
voices. Unflappably patriotic one moment, it dares to redefine
patriotism by questioning democracy, the police and the averageness
of the average American citizen the next. And this is 1942, the year
after that day which lived on in Michael Bay's dream-theatre, if not
in infamy. Although "Saboteur" never specifically references Pearl
Harbor, every scene reminds us that America's response to it was
built upon a far more conflicted moral foundation than Bay would have
us believe today. I could think of no film to better parallel the
current emptying of what right and wrong meant before Sept. 11th.
"Saboteur" is accorded a lower rung on the Hitchcock totem pole,
usually for two reasons Hitch himself voiced in the landmark
interview book "Hitchcock-Truffaut": indifferent casting and the
confusing sabotage story. But had Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart played
Barry Kane, a munitions worker wrongly accused of setting an aircraft
plant ablaze, their myths would have washed over the central conceit
of the film — that international politics can strike down the
average Joe at any time. So common-as-muck Robert Cummings provides
the gawky, deer-in-the-headlights iconography the role requires. And
what better way to signal his bewilderment than to not flesh out the
fascist plot to blow up the Normandie. The jarring ellipses
and fuzzy motivations pull us into the vortex right along with our
hero-by-necessity.
In an effort to clear his name, Kane traverses a lot of ground,
physically and philosophically. There's a tier of secondary
characters who offer him a chaotic discourse on what right and wrong
look like and the American duty to act upon it. Otto Kruger plays Mr.
Tobin, the mastermind behind the fascist plot (another casting coup
to my eyes — I know Kruger from his warm, sacrificing roles in
the 1934 Joan Crawford vehicle "Chained" and Douglas Sirk's
"Magnificent Obsession," the paternal homoeroticism of the latter
marvelously recontextualized by Mark Rappaport in "Rock Hudson's Home
Movies"). "A prominent citizen, widely respected," Mr. Tobin, with
his ever-reclining, chain-smoking band of dandies (including the
elusive Mr. Freeman, who makes an equation of fascism with long
hair), has been able to maintain his covert operation so effectively
because no one would suspect an upper-cruster of being involved with
such evil.
The same preconceptions befall a caravan of circus performers. Under
the guidance of Bones, The Human Skeleton, they vote on whether or
not to hand Kane and the reluctant heroine Patricia Martin (played by
the equally blah Priscilla Lane) over to the police. It's a turning
point for Patricia, who has been trying to turn Kane in. "They made
me feel so ashamed; they're so nice and trusting," ignorant of her
own prejudice. And then there's Patricia's blind father who can "see"
Kane's innocence (not to mention the "alarmist" paranoia of the
police) in a way that Patricia cannot.
Not all these voices are given equal play, or sometimes even a chance
to utter. Tobin and his "family" get their eerie reverse shot as Kane
is hauled away for the first time, but the circus performers do not
as Kane and Patricia make their way to the next bend of the story.
Once they've served their humbling purpose, Hitch makes them
disappear. But even before that, certain voices never get heard.
Titania, "our little human mountain," doesn't get to vote on Kane's
fate because Bones claims her weight puts her on both sides of the
fence (as Patricia notes later, "I don't suppose you can blame the
fat lady, though, when a woman has lost her figure like that").
Nevertheless, Hitchcock succeeds in creating a universe where nothing
is rock-solid anymore, not even the Statue of Liberty, the cold,
pitiless witness to the final showdown between Kane and Frank Fry,
the real saboteur. Fry falls from the Lady's torch to his death, but
the compulsory heterosexual ending, more involuntary than usual, does
nothing to convince us that all moral categories have been
straightened out. No silent monument is going to shed its grace on
them. Nor on us. The least we can do for ourselves is to not merely
listen to but actively solicit secondary voices, as the inbred
incoherence of "Saboteur" signals. And then perhaps the manageable
loop of Sept. 11th will finally become Sept. 12th.
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